Kiryas Joel buys property for water towers

Woodbury — Kiryas Joel has bought a half-acre strip beside the Gonzaga park property and plans to build two water towers 100 feet from the spot where Orange County denied permission to install them.

Chris McKenna

Woodbury — Kiryas Joel has bought a half-acre strip beside the Gonzaga park property and plans to build two water towers 100 feet from the spot where Orange County denied permission to install them.

The new location neatly bypasses the angry objections to parkland encroachment that derailed the project in July. But it could open a new round of fighting, this time over how much input Woodbury has on the installation of the tanks.

Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin argues that state law allows one municipality to build inside another without seeking planning board approval or a building permit. He said he plans to submit the paperwork to Woodbury for comments, but only as a courtesy. In his view, the only agency that needs to sign off on the plans is the Orange County Health Department.

Woodbury Supervisor John Burke, who fought the earlier proposal on the principle that parkland is sacred, said yesterday that he still had concerns about the towers and would ask the town's lawyers if Kiryas Joel could truly skip the planning process.

"Water towers can't just be put up willy-nilly, anyplace," he said.

The 34-foot-high tanks emerged a few months ago as the latest hot potato for Kiryas Joel and its neighbors. The village needs them to increase water pressure in one section of the community and asked to install them on the county-owned Gonzaga property because of its elevation.

But the county Legislature shot down the request after some lawmakers, along with officials and citizens in Woodbury and Blooming Grove, opposed building on protected parkland.

After weighing its options, including seizing the site through eminent domain, Kiryas Joel paid a private landowner $200,000 for a half-acre of woods with the same elevation as the Gonzaga location. The seller was none other than Ziggy Brach, a prominent opponent of Kiryas Joel's political leaders.

Asked about the deal, Brach said the community's water needs transcended politics. He felt that opposition to the tanks had been "overly, overly done."

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